From the Start
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day 1148: When Quinn gets to Yale she knows things will be different, that no one knows who she is now or was before. - TOP 15 cycle: #2 - Quinn


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 54th cycle. Now cycle 55!_

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_**Favorites cycle** - It's that time again, where I gather a list of my fifteen favorite characters, relationships, friendships, etc of the moment! It's constantly evolving, and if I did it over today, as the list was selected weeks ago, it would already be different. But oh well, there'll be later opportunities ;) So then, here we go!  
**At number 2 - Quinn Fabray**_

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**"From the Start"  
Quinn**

There was nothing around, place or person, that she knew. It could all seem frightening, to wonder how she could possibly start from scratch all over again. In her case though, it was sort of a blessing.

No one knew who Quinn Fabray was here. No one knew the cheerleader who had slept with her boyfriend's best friend and ended up getting pregnant. They didn't know the girl who had been thrown out of her home by her father and had to live in one home and the next for months until giving birth to a daughter and giving her up for adoption by her classmate's birth mother. She hadn't spent the next two years trying to figure out who she was, with mistake after mistake, all the while suffering in silence, only to nearly die in a car accident just when she was starting to find her way... as far as they knew.

That was the girl from Lima, Ohio, and she may still have been that girl, inside, but on the outside no one knew all these truths, so why should they? It was like starting a new game level, her progress saved... and now she could move on.

She could start again, and she felt it as soon as she neared the dorm building, and she could see everything else off in the distance... A completely new place for a newly realized girl.

She had her room number in hand, and after a search which could have been a lot more trying than it had ended up being, she had landed at the door bearing that number. She was the first to arrive, no roommate in sight yet. That was good in that it gave her a choice. She picked the side of the room on the right because she could see out the window once she sat.

She would start her new life here, and it would take some time to adjust, but none more than to the fact that it was just as she had originally seen it, a place where she knew nothing, no one. Just because it meant that she could start again, it didn't mean she wouldn't miss it, the place where she had grown, and the people she had grown with.

Being away from her mother would be one of the harder things she would have to do. After her father had kicked her out, she had been angry with him, and rightly so, but then her mother... Part of her had wanted to be angry with her as well, for just sitting there and not saying anything, not when she had realized she was pregnant, which was already a thing done on the night her father had discovered it, but also for keeping quiet when her father had told her to get out of his house. With time she had managed to see past it, especially when she had come and told her to come home. They had done their best to rebuild their relationship since then, and it had not been an easy road, but after not having been there for her daughter once, Judy had never abandoned her again. Now they were apart again, but for a reason better than the last... and Quinn would miss her.

And then there was the Glee Club, all her friends... In the beginning she never would have seen it possible, that she should ever look at most of them as friends, people to be missed... Some of them had already been friends, some more than friends, though today she could count herself lucky to still be able to call them her friends, after everything she had put them through. She carried them in memories both mental and physical, and she knew that just as with her mother it wasn't like she'd never see them again, but still... No matter where she was at in those three years, she knew she had one constant, and that was the people in that room. They had not abandoned them, even though she had given them every reason to. She would miss it, as frustrating as it could be sometimes, how complicated and exhausting...

In that room she was doing all these things that made her happy, whether she admitted it or not. And the people, her friends, people she could say she loved... whether she admitted it or not. Life had given her so many chances to show it, and she had squandered most of them.

Now she was here, in this new place, with no mile-long back story pinned to the front of her shirt. She had spent so much time worried about the way people looked at her, if they could see her, and it had brought her joy and pain both hand in hand. Chances like this did not come every day, and it had come as a direct result of all the work she had done... She wasn't letting this one go to waste, not again, not now.

She wasn't hiding herself, wouldn't so much lie as she would hold her past as information that was her own, her past, which didn't have to make her present anything other than what she wanted it to be. Despite the ups and downs, she still had her pride, in what she had achieved and become, and she could only look ahead and hope that she would continue to feel this way.

She had barely had the time to choose her side of the room and put her bags down before she heard the jingle of the doorknob turning under another hand. That would be her roommate, she guessed. Now it would all begin, and she would discover the person she was, here in her new home.

THE END

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******A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.  
****In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are  
************always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!**


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